capitalism

P
PAINE, THOMAS (1737–1809)
Thomas Paine was an agitator and a political pamphleteer
with strong anarchist leanings. Paine enthusiastically participated
in the American and French Revolutions as an
advocate of individual rights and minimal government. He
authored several of the most popular and influential works
of the age, including Common Sense, The Crisis, Rights of
Man, Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice.
Paine based his political philosophy on the belief that
the central dynamic of domestic politics was the conflict
between what he called state and society. He argued that
society consisted of the “productive classes,” which
included laborers, farmers, artisans, small merchants, and
small manufacturers not holding government-chartered
monopolies. The state, in contrast, consisted of government
officials, standing armies, blue-water navies, aristocrats,
established clergy, and holders of government-chartered
monopolies, the “plundering classes” who used state power
to live off the productive classes through taxation.
Domestic politics, Paine believed, could be best explained
as the conflict between these “two classes of men in the
nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live
upon them.”
This domestic antagonism extended into foreign affairs
as well. In Paine’s view, war was, in part, an attempt by the
plundering classes to increase revenue through the conquest
of territories whose productive members could be
exploited. At the same time, these wars of conquest served
to distract a nation’s own productive classes, with the aim
of shifting their attention from internal exploitation to the
enemy abroad. Finally, war was an attempt by the plundering
classes to increase taxation in the territories already
under their control by creating a crisis in which national
humiliation or annihilation might result should increased
taxes be resisted. In summary, war was perpetrated by the
plundering classes at the expense of the productive classes
to further their exploitation.
Paine urged societies to rebel against their states and set
up republics. His conception of republicanism adumbrated
the classical liberal vision of a self-ordering, commercial
society consisting largely of self-interested individuals.
Government’s role was confined to presiding over the
clashing interests that occur in advanced commercial societies
and not to attempting to promote virtue. Paine attributed
social order not primarily to virtuous citizenry or a
benign government, but to the “mutual and reciprocal interest”
of individuals in society. He claimed that, during the
American Revolution,
there were no established forms of government. The old
governments had been abolished, and the country was too
much occupied in defense, to employ its attention to establishing
new governments; yet during this interval, order
and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country
in Europe.
In this spontaneously generated order, virtue was highly
desirable, but was not necessary to preserve civil peace. The
danger to public order came not from individuals bereft of
virtue, but from excessive governmental power. Because
liberal governments would have minimal coercive power, it
was not crucial that their politicians be particularly virtuous.
Liberal republics, Paine argued, are held together by
commerce, rather than status or virtue. Commerce was beneficial
to both the citizens and the state; it contributed to the
wealth of nations and helped protect liberal governments
from internal counterrevolution and invasions by despotic
powers. International trade has a “civilizing effect” on all
who participate in it; additionally, it would “temper the
human mind” and help people “to know and understand
each other.” Commerce encourages peace by drawing the
world together into mutual dependency. Because consumer
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